If everyone is bullshitting the answer, telling you want you want to hear, what the hell is the use of the question in the first place?
See if they'll resort to lying to get a job, and resign to moronic management demands in general. If you want people for dead-end positions, I think this is exactly what you'd want them to do. You want those that lie.
That's because Christianity lacked the power, not the desire.
Sure, after all, what power does e.g. the Roman Emperor have ?
It's all good and well to claim e.g. South America was converted by soldiers, but what I find sorely lacking in that explanation is how exactly ~ 2000 soldiers defeat tens of millions of people ?
There are plenty of books on that. But I don't even understand the question. Fact is that the Americas were conquered, a large percentage of its population exterminated, and the rest forced to convert to Christianity.
True, but you won't like what the primary historical sources tell of that event. If I were to tell that story you'd immediately point out that it was written by monks which were part of the invading army, with a few details coming from the ship's logs of the conquerors. There are no other sources. The primary sources tell that the "invasion army" was in fact joined by natives and only had to fight it's first fight with the inca "god". At that point their army was so large that it was >90% natives, and it actually had the numerical advantage. The causes for this were apparently related to the inca method of tax collection, which involved kidnapping people (for not paying enough tax perhaps ? It is not known why exactly), torturing them for months and then finally the famous procedure where they cut out their hearts. So now you can go ahead and scream about this being a description of infidels by Christian monks... but... there are no other sources. With their "god" dead, and no clear way to name a successor due to the sacking of the capital, the religion collapsed in a matter of years. Primary sources state that nobody was sorry to see it go.
Needless to say, these sources don't mesh very well with progressive ideology. The sad part is that these sorts of explanations mesh pretty well with the experience of pretty much any civilization that was more advanced than it's surroundings. Persians found their neighbours... barbarians (and they would have had to walk the other way and 3x further to find the first group of humans with comparable technology and ethics to their own). Greeks did. Romans did. The Chinese did. All such primary sources describe finding primitive villages, ruled by direct violence. The people in those villages like nothing more than to join the advanced civilization, after they find that it isn't so easy to sack a technologically superior enemy. And in the cases where they do succeed in sacking them, due to logistical problems for example, like the muslims did to the romans and the jews, the experience is one of constant rabid and unpredictable violence on a massive scale. Despite what you may think, the myth of the noble savage is just that, a myth.
As for the "exterminated" part, I think that's massively unfair. First of all, it took quite a while for that to happen, and it actually largely happened after the conquest. As to the manner in which happened, how can you possibly give the impression that this was the intent ? This happened because European feet were washed in the same river as native feet. Blaming the "invaders" makes about as much sense as claiming meteorites are weapons of mass destruction. Sometimes things go horribly wrong, and a meteor can make millions of victims. But it is a mere phenomenon, and until at least the 20th century it was no more under the control of humans as hurricanes.
The phenomenon itself, those diseases, has a name. It's called "island species" and was described by Darwin himself. I've got more bad news for you : we're still doing that. Give it another 400-500 years and there will be no more black people, anywhere in the world. Are we massacring them ? Because this process will complete first in America. (island species is a ridiculous name for this btw, "island races" would be more accurate). African Americans will be about as different from the aver
Historically, Christianity has done it the other way around: first conquer, then conversions.
Cute thought. Read up on history. Not even the most rabid anti-christian historians claim any hint of violence during the first 4 centuries of Christianity. 4 centuries. In case you're confused, that would be between 10 and 12 generations. And this was under constant violence against Christians. Even after that, Christianity has always been spread by absurdly small numbers of people. It's all good and well to claim e.g. South America was converted by soldiers, but what I find sorely lacking in that explanation is how exactly ~ 2000 soldiers defeat tens of millions of people ? Well, let's just say either they had some serious divine help, or most of those conversions were at the very least not at the point of a gun. The same can be said about most (granted, not all) other "forced" conversions to Christianity. You can claim 200 soldiers defeated most of Northern Europe until the cows come home, but...
Contrast this with how pakistan became muslim : the most modest death tolls are talking about 200 million corpses. How Xinjang became muslim : probably around 20 million corpses. How northern africa became muslim : ~ 30 million corpses (out of a population of less than 50 million). Iran : ~1 million corpses according to babylonian and persian sources (which again was a hell of a percentage of the local population) (they didn't even believe these numbers themselves. Neither nation even had a word denoting a million, so they had to use weird multiplication to describe it. Were they lying ? Perhaps about the number, not about how it spread). And let's not forget the constant massacres muslims committed in Spain, which are very well documented (starting with the granada, toledo and various massacres, starting immediately after the invasion). And the massacres today...
Somehow where muslims go, genocide always follows. Whether we're talking Europe, South Africa, China, South Asia, Northern Asia, Russia,... none of it matters.
Can we at the very least agree that there is a VERY clear difference here ? Sure it's not Christianity 100% innocent - islam 0%. It's more like Christianity 99.9% innocent - islam 0.1% (a few isolated lucky breaks). Moral equivalence is a dumb theory.
That's what a Christian is: a communist who uses God to justify their policies.
And the other choice is what, exactly ? An atheist socialist who acts like the Soviets, sees no reason to not kill a few hundred million people because he has some pseudo-scientific excuse (or military, or he just hates them, or doesn't like their ideology, or... does anyone have an exhaustive list of reasons the Soviets committed genocide ? It's gonna be a long list).
In short I daresay that if this is the difference between a Christian communist and the atheist kind, then I'll take my chances with the Christian kind, thank you very much.
And if Europe got its act together, liberalized, and started defending itself instead of relying on the US, the US would be fighting fewer wars.
In reference to your above comment : make Europe a 90% Christian nation again, and this will happen in a matter of months. As long as atheist "progressives" run amok : not a chance in hell. After all, wars are caused by guns, aren't they ? And by Jews, of course... (just parrotting the general progressive excuse for defunding militaries and explaining the immediate followup violence) (oh and if you accuse a european liberal of racism, then he scratches "Jews", replaces it by Israeli, and proceeds to say that he doesn't quite like the local brand of recognizable (also known as orthodox) "Israelis" either)
So you mean that lowering the food supply, so rich ecologians can driving cars while feeling good, combined with dozens of policies to redirect all sorts of resources from food to ill-fated inferior products has not resulted in exponential population growth.
No it doesn't. Well, only if you interpret it's goal of eventually converting every human, and "claim" the land they live on as a world-conquest goal. I suppose in some ways that's reasonable. But compare it to the islamic goal of militarily killing or converting every piece of land on the planet (yes, land, they have little interest in people. In fact there is discussion whether slaves, or conquered people, even when they claim to be part of the faith are muslims even today amongst institutions. E.g. the taliban, say "no", so do the salafists (which are still > 60% of all muslims worldwide). muslim ideology is all about conquering states)... it's clearly not on the same level. Similarly, compare it to the communist goal of violent revolutions in every state structure across the globe, resulting in everything being controlled by a single communist party... not quite on par, don't you agree ?
Communism, fascism, and socialism are very similar to Christianity (so similar, in fact, that American conservatives keep accusing European nations run by conservative Christians as being "socialist").
If you go by the names of the parties, perhaps (even there it'd be a stretch). But these were at best a tiny socialist veneer over a capitalist core. I doubt you could say the same about the Soviet Union, Southern America, or Eastern Europe. And it wouldn't apply to quite a few of even those European nations. Yes the core of Western Europe... it probably applies there. Outside of that geographically small part of Europe... not so much.
Besides I've been there. While it's true that there is some measure of conservative Christians there, the prevailing conservative political ideology is ex-communists who changed their minds when they saw what huge damage was done. They mostly were openly communist in their youth, and then saw what the Soviet union pulled. Needless to say, they didn't want that to happen there. They still like the idea of communism, but they... well they don't want to live in a communist state. So they try to be as communist as possible without actually touching the basic operation of the economy, e.g. their pension systems, sick leave, etc really are an application of "from each according to ability, to each according to need". And these people are utterly disgusted by how young people sabotage these systems en-masse, and even more so by how "political refugees" do it. They really want to have this quiet life where you work, and are provided for, and they're abhorred because they understand perfectly well that it won't work with the way the new generation is using these systems, and they're desperately looking for solutions. Just read the history of the French government, like Bertrand Couchner, who is a really good example. At which point Christianity has any role in this, well... you tell me.
These guys are opposed by the "progressive" parties, whose main role seems to be to maximally exploit the laws these conservatives made. They're all about making sure that people who just arrived from brazil or morocco as "political refugees" get their "right" to free health care, "living wages" and so on, despite them obviously moving to europe for free cancer care. The argument that this will obviously destroy the system that they depend on does not seem to even scare these people. They have "rights" you see, and the state must provide, getting money from whoever has it*, like their parents did before.
* the scary part of these parties, which they will deny screaming, is of course that this is exactly one step removed from "get it from our neighbors". Some of these parties actually advocate militarily attacking e.g. american corporations and raid them for money. Tell me, how far would that be removed from open war ? And the only thing those corporations (not exclusively American ones btw, Dutch Petr
Great idea. There is of course a tiny little difference here. islam claims the whole world as it's territory (split up in "already conquered" (dar al islam) and "to conquer" (dar al harb)). There's the tiny little issue of course that ideologies need territorial control to exist. Or at the very least, I hope you can see why ideologies don't share ground with islam and it's constant genocides. Communists ran extermination campaigns in some parts of the middle east just for this reason.
As for your idea of non-deistic ideologies... they've not exactly provided us with peace either. Communism comes to mind as an obvious example. All sorts of dictatorial idelogies, of course. What else do we have ? Socialism has not exactly been peaceful, insofar it's even different from communism of course. Buddhism, insofar as it's a non-deistic religion (it's not imho, but you hear the argument often), has not exactly been peaceful. I mean when it comes to being peaceful... euhm... pure capitalism (if this exists) ? While I can't seem to come up with any specific wars caused by this, well maybe Iraq, anyway regardless of the cause of the Iraq war, consensus seems to be it's not exactly peaceful... Is nazism non-deistic ? Hmmm.
So do tell, which ideology, preferably one that has actually run a state (ie. isn't totally in the realm of fantasy), would you suggest ?
So if I pirate a DVD player program, play legally owned DVDs with it, you are going to sue me to take away my happiness for the X amount of hours I spent using the software? I'm not even going to bother asking how you determine the value of X, assuming the crack prevented the program from phoning home.
Believe it or not, this is a solved problem. How do you reimburse people for damages that usually can't be undone ? This problem was solved, oh about 2000BC (it's used in old testament texts) : It's why damages are awarded in money. You're supposed to provide the damaged party an amount in money equivalent for the suffered loss. So if you pay somebody $5 for watching your car and he drives it off a cliff, he doesn't buy you a new car. Rather he pays you in dollars for your loss, as determined by a neutral third party, the judge. How much if your rich fiancee was in the car at the time ? Determined by the judge.
For both of your X'es, if not known (through some legal means, like someone testifying), the judge will simply let both parties give their opinion on the matter, and pick one (why pick one ? To make it more likely that both parties say something reasonable. If you say 0 as a defendant, or $100 billion as a plaintiff, you get stuck with whatever the other party pins on you. Get it ?).
I realize these things are probably not going to satisfy you. But let's face it, I don't think you'd settle for anything other than "steal away" (I think steal is justified here, since you're more than likely to have the same opinion on things like vendor contracts (like cell phone), employment contracts, actually hacking to bypass a payment on a site,... Essentially that you know perfectly well it's wrong, and don't care about your own legal obligations. Needless to say, that won't fly in court (three guesses why).
In fact I think this is the whole problem : you think that just because you can you should be allowed to.
Oh you don't know. You only have to be compatible with one system. A Sun system that is older than I am, to be exact.
In fact I know one country that pays $100k for every single healthcare computer, because it's the only approved model their software runs on (which is still in development, using mainframe development tools). Today they have to be custom made one-by-one. Thank God they've at least used an emulator for the storage of things like pictures and scans, so actual hard drives can be used (well 16G, but hey. That's modern for these guys)
Although I disagree with your assessment, even assuming it's true.
Clearly in your mind theft justifies genocide of you and your children. And we all know you've stolen from someone at some point, so... Yes if you want to move into my apartment and I get to blow you, your family, wife, girlfriend, children and generally anyone you know up for fun after that (don't worry I'll claim there's some religion involved).
But let's not even go there. You're one of the "moral equivalence" lefties. You've clearly done something wrong in your life, like lying for example. And you claim every crime justifies any kind of revenge. You've lied to me, is that not enough for me to massacre your family ? I mean why draw the line for justified massacring at theft, why not at mere lying. Or better yet, at mere irritation.
Oh wait, let's use the excuses the paedophile prophet used : allah told me to massacre you one of your children stole from me (from a village 25km away, kid had not a single mean of transport) I no longer feel like respecting the peace treaty allah forbade me from respecting the peace treaty women (even without explicitly defining what exactly was done) Because I can, you cannot defend yourself, and clearly by winning we're superior (says the guy who at one point ordered 4 women to carry him, unwounded just very fat, up a hill to escape a force defending a city he was attacking)
Oh and muslims were massacring Jews 1400 years before modern Israel existed. And they have not wasted the years in between either. In fact I seriously doubt there is any people on this planet that has not yet been on the receiving end of a muslim massacre.
I mean in order to give rationale to muslim massacres you'd not just have to explain what Jews or Americans have done, but don't forget Black people living in the Sahara (Sudan and elsewhere) Somalians Buddhist Taiwanese Christian Filipinos Chinese Malaysians, I'm betting the large majority was communist Chinese Indonesians, same Hindu Pakistani Hindu Bangladeshi Hindu Indians
Tell me, have they all... *shudder*... stolen something ? Oh sure that justifies wiping them out then !
How about a simpler solution : let's wipe out islam, and end 95% of wars on this planet. I'm sure people will find a new excuse, but it'll be quiet for 200 years or so at least.
From now on I get to pound your house with ill-aimed rockets aimed at you, your kids, your wife, your girlfriend. You do not get to initiate any kind of violence in response to this, not calling the police, not running out of that house, nothing. After a few months of that we can "talk" (by that I mean I'll shoot you the moment you enter the room).
Any action on your part will obviously make you a war criminal, by your own standards, agreed ? Since you clearly consider this reasonable conditions, let's get started.
You know pretty well what the evidence is. Iran has been confirmed as having a large scale tritium production facility.
So here's the deal : either Iran knows more about the nuclear physics than we do, and has some weird use for large amounts of tritium or they're making a bomb
The same argument is true for their reactor design. It's a horrible power producer, and a reasonably efficient enrichment facility.
The same is true about the site : it's electricity connection is pathetic, barely an afterthought. Why do they need a nuclear power plant that is not connected to the grid (not well enough to supply real amounts of power to the grid, obviously it is somewhat connected).
The same is true about the amount of centrifuges they need. For operation of this power plant, you need, say, a hundred. For making a bomb you'd need at least 5000. How much do they have ? Somewhere around 9000.
There are dozens more considerations like this. Sure all of these are like 99%-1% dividers. There is a small chance of "innocence" in all cases, looked at individually. Nobody believes the whole picture is anywhere near coincidental.
And if people like you ever get in charge the first war that comes to call, maybe a small border skirmish, would immediately develop into WWIII.
I hope you have the intelligence to see why this would happen. But the very, very short, extremely simplified, version goes like this : people attack because they believe they can win (for some definition of win), and obviously have decided to use force. If they do indeed win, they will not stop, they will switch to their secondary objectives. That's why if Iraq and Iran are fighting, the correct tactical action is to support the losing side, to the point that the balance between them is maintained (preferably while weakening both of them extremely). Had Iraq seriously advanced, the US would have supported Iran.
There is the faint hope in the back of my mind that maybe, just maybe, you'll see that this is indeed the right thing to do. It's not just a military decision.
No, it has to do with the fact that socialist take offence with the fact that they have to share their communications platforms with competing ideas. Not exactly news to anyone, that the tolerance of "liberals" is far below the freezing point, but hey...
Tit for tat does not explain kindness to strangers. It explains a limited form of trade between near-equal partners. It does not explain kindness to strangers - at all. In a Nash equilibrium most people would have 0 interactions, and hence receive no aid. It doesn't work.
As for a definition of morality -- it is just that: behaving in a social fashion, rather than an asocial fashion.
And your conviction of atheism is equally socially based. The only argument for atheism that matters in your mind can be simplified into that your friends think it cool. In reality you believe in nothing, you're just somewhat adapted to your environment.
Something that would NEVER happen in the real world.
Right. This merely shows that your understanding of evolution was last seen in any serious mind in the 19th century... In reality most "evolution" is exactly that, genes moving from one species to another, through viruses and other infectious agents. Most genes get "developed" in lifeforms with really, really short evolutionary cycles. Usually not even bacteria, but the most simple prokaryotic lifeforms. Then those genes get transplanted through bacteriophages (or merely bad timing during cell division) into bacteria, which then infect plants and animals and...
The human genome plays host to no less than 12 near-complete viral DNA codes. That's when you're not sick. It also contains multiple long strands of bacterial DNA.
You do realize you're giving poisonous plant as options here, right ? Yes using massive automation (not available in large parts of the world) it can be made mostly safe... but come on ! You're arguing that poisonous plants are a solution to eating healthy...
Also, taking nutricional advice from a propaganda site like that... what can possibly go wrong, too bad like with all these "good for nature" policies, others must suffer for your delusions.
Not that what the google search reveals unfortunately happens about 5 times yearly in Europe and America, and is entirely 100% avoidable. There's no shortage of issues with veganism and pregnancy either. Sadly, if children suffer nutrient deficiency in the womb, they hardly ever recover.
I haven't read too much so far about mathematical philosophy, but Bertrand Russell at least appears to propose alternatives to Peano's axioms.
True, if memory serves he proposed ZFC, which is now known to be vastly more inconsistent than ZF. It's inconsistent in ways that you will run into in daily life. Nobody uses it though.
My argument that the creation of models of the world on the basis of evidence and testing is a process not compatible with 'believe this because an authority says so', but that humans frequently use one of the two at a time depending on which seems most appropriate to them? I don't see how the models not being perfect models causes problems for this argument.
The problem is that you accept one known-to-be-wrong argument (e.g. ZF, but likewise things like relativity and quantum theory, and loads of inconsistent theories further on) on external authority, and claims of it's utility, yet refuse to do the same for a might-be-wrong model, where you admit equal utility exists... For science "utility" is reason enough, yet it isn't enough for religion. Those models of science are like stating "the sky was painted blue 500 years ago", it provides an accurate description, useful prediction, and is known to be wrong. Yet you would never accept that theory : it is not merely "imperfect" in that it has a few holes. It is wrong, in the sense that it contradicts itself. Just because you are not currently properly equipped to detect the holes in, say, even in classical mechanics does not mean they don't exist.
Which makes the "they're correct" argument bullshit for your belief in science. So what remains ? Utility. Would you seriously claim that belief in the bible is not useful, given the current civilization that it has managed to build ? (I don't like that argument, actually, you should not believe because of utility, you should believe, plain and simple. If utility is what drives your life, you are a very poor person indeed)
My belief that humans have a moral capacity consisting of a set of emotions triggered by certain situations isn't a result of my atheism.
And it is trivial to produce a counterexample (in fact it's easy to point out that finding 100 million counterexamples would not be a huge problem. If you look towards history, it is plain to see that there have been huge time periods where these "human" morals barely existed -if at all. Likewise, today, these human morals you describe are not shared by baffling numbers of humans). Ergo this statement is plainly wrong.
Besides any rational being would not even consider that argument. Rationality is supposed to be uninfluenced by low instincts and emotions, and I would consider this a far more important property of a rational person than having or lacking faith. Emotions will preclude any form of thought, rational or otherwise. In comparison, faith merely takes a few potentially rational options off the table, and puts others on the table in their place. Locking out strong emotions is far more important to a rational human than locking out faith. I know it is to me.
Whatever you say about how "natural human emotion" guides you towards good, I am perfectly aware of where it usually guides me. And trust me, it doesn't guide me towards anything remotely considered good morals. Are your emotions that different ?
The religious in many important religions have tried to claim human morality for themselves. They've taken something innately human and said 'this is from us,
I've already shown that there is nothing whatsoever innately human about your morality (anything else would be a massive contradiction with what we know about the brain, for one thing). The only innate morality that exists is the law of the jungle, with perhaps limited extensions with kindness to close relatives, due to darwinism working in groups as well as on an individual level.
I couldn't have said it better. It's pure calorie content, and indeed it's too high in America.
But even there, comparing the consequences of too high versus too low, you'll be going for the "too high" category if you have any sense. Of course, that doesn't quite justify taking in 3x your requirements...
Still it's better to overfeed the poor (and everybody else) than to starve them. As anyone outside of America knows...
Oh great, another propaganda point that somehow supersedes a 3 centuries of research (keeping soldiers alive on the high seas was an intense focus of research with lots of fuckups... and you know what they already knew 3 centuries ago ? No matter what the fuckup, raw meat can fix it. Cooked/baked meat and fish (raw or cooked) can fix the large majority of fuckups with a few notable exceptions).
People (mostly small children though) die from not eating meat If you die from too much meat, it'll be at 50 at the earliest.
And yes with a massively varied diet of plants you can avoid the need to eat meat almost completely. Not quite completely, but almost. To the point that your body can survive for maybe 2 decades without meat. This requires constant nutritional supplements (usually made from fish, so there's barely any nutricional supplements that qualify as vegetarian) and medical monitoring. It is a very difficult exercise, that's basically impossible in all but the most developed countries. You can cheat and drink milk and eat eggs, which will help a lot.
Your dietary suggestion of beans + grain is moronic. How about you eat beans and grains exclusively for 4 months, and we bet for 1000 dollars that it won't work. Of course, that's a bad bet, since either you cheat, or you die... In both cases I doubt I'll see any money. You will after all have died from the most basic of food diseases, scurvy, after 2-3 months. That would be 2-3 weeks at best if you didn't start out living in one of the most developed nations on earth.
In practice 2 weeks will cause enough symptoms to manifest themselves that the pain alone will drive you back to normalcy : after about a week on your proposed diet you will get small wounds which won't heal, usually in places like the corners of the mouth or between the fingers and toes. They won't heal. A little after that they will start to rip open merely because you move your body. A crust will form on them, time and again, but it will be unable to remain attached to your skin. These wounds will slowly grow in size. From that point on you will feel extremely bad and spend upwards of 14 hours in bed each day, you will lose interest in anything and everyting, complaining of a constant headache. And we're not even at ONE month yet. After a month you will lose the ability to breathe normally and have a constant sharp pain in your bones. Keep it up, and a few teeth will fall out, you will constantly have blood in your mouth, the result of large infected areas in your mouth, rendering you unable to eat or drink without extreme discomfort. Likewise, blood will leak from the other small wounds, which at this point won't be all that small anymore. After this, random internal bleeding will start occuring, making you look like a person who's gone 10 rounds against Mike Tyson, unsuccessfully. From this point on, if you're unlucky, it takes a few weeks for you to die. You will die from total loss of internal body cohesion : blood will literally leak everywhere, and at the autopsy if they break your skin without taking the pressure of first, it will gusher out.
Any other dietary suggestions ? Hint : best include the most basic of additives, vitamin C. It would also be great if you actually noticed that plants do not contain all 9 of the essential amino acids, and so you will have to include at least two non-plant lifeforms. And please note that children have 13 essential amino acids, so their dietary requirements (in the sense that they die if they don't get it) are more extensive. There are tons of special cases where additional nutrients are required either because of genetic predisposition or simple external factors ranging from contact with salt water to lack of sunlight.
There is one substance that contains all required nutrients for a human being : meat (raw meat). With fish being a close second (likewise raw), with only a few omissions. Pulverizing the bones and adding them to the meat itself makes both meat and fish much healthier (a feature ironically only part of "low-quality" meats).
Are they absolutely required ? No. But if you don't take them... you get to puzzle everything together. Miss one piece and you will not like the result at all.
Rich countries outlaw GM crops, and become net importers of food instead of exporters... and since food is extremely inelastic, this results in relatively large price increases for food...
Add to that the fact that the human population is still growing exponentially.
The only way to limit resistance, is to not protect the vast majority of the population. That would help (it might in fact decrease resistance). The potential "pool" in which these bacteria live is the whole of the human species. And what matters is how much of that pool is filled with the medicine when it also is in contact with the bacteria. Whether or not that pool is filled in places without contact... no one cares. As long as you keep protecting the population that contact area is necessarily close to 100% of the bacteria's breeding ground... and for the bacterium it's "adapt or die" just like it is for us. So far, with 2 exceptions, they've adapted. And I hear that thanks to muslims, those 2 exceptions are in serious danger of becoming not so exceptional at all anymore.
Unless by "only when necessary" means that you let the diseases take their course and only when it is absolutely (and painfully, in most cases) clear that the patient will not recover without antibiotics do you administer them, and then only in a huge dosage, and quarantine the patient for a week after the treatment ends. Of course, mistakes will be made and people will die (though in the very long term casualties will be minimized, I doubt that'll be a great comfort to parents who get to see first hand that the child death rate goes up significantly under scenarios like this. And of course people would die within meters of substances that would cure them, with the cost paid much later by the population as a whole). And of course this is extremely unrealistic in the case of an epidemic.
Even then, over time you're strengthening the immune system of parts of the population unevenly. We all know how that ended last time.
On the other hand, if we make the assumption that medicine will advance fast enough to compensate for resistance, then overusing antibiotics is probably the best tactic. And there's plenty of historical precedent for that assumption, even if it's of course not a certainty. "Adapt or die", up close and personal. Lord help us if another war breaks out though.
Slashdot Mirror
If everyone is bullshitting the answer, telling you want you want to hear, what the hell is the use of the question in the first place?
See if they'll resort to lying to get a job, and resign to moronic management demands in general. If you want people for dead-end positions, I think this is exactly what you'd want them to do. You want those that lie.
That's because Christianity lacked the power, not the desire.
Sure, after all, what power does e.g. the Roman Emperor have ?
It's all good and well to claim e.g. South America was converted by soldiers, but what I find sorely lacking in that explanation is how exactly ~ 2000 soldiers defeat tens of millions of people ?
There are plenty of books on that. But I don't even understand the question. Fact is that the Americas were conquered, a large percentage of its population exterminated, and the rest forced to convert to Christianity.
True, but you won't like what the primary historical sources tell of that event. If I were to tell that story you'd immediately point out that it was written by monks which were part of the invading army, with a few details coming from the ship's logs of the conquerors. There are no other sources. The primary sources tell that the "invasion army" was in fact joined by natives and only had to fight it's first fight with the inca "god". At that point their army was so large that it was >90% natives, and it actually had the numerical advantage. The causes for this were apparently related to the inca method of tax collection, which involved kidnapping people (for not paying enough tax perhaps ? It is not known why exactly), torturing them for months and then finally the famous procedure where they cut out their hearts. So now you can go ahead and scream about this being a description of infidels by Christian monks ... but ... there are no other sources. With their "god" dead, and no clear way to name a successor due to the sacking of the capital, the religion collapsed in a matter of years. Primary sources state that nobody was sorry to see it go.
Needless to say, these sources don't mesh very well with progressive ideology. The sad part is that these sorts of explanations mesh pretty well with the experience of pretty much any civilization that was more advanced than it's surroundings. Persians found their neighbours ... barbarians (and they would have had to walk the other way and 3x further to find the first group of humans with comparable technology and ethics to their own). Greeks did. Romans did. The Chinese did. All such primary sources describe finding primitive villages, ruled by direct violence. The people in those villages like nothing more than to join the advanced civilization, after they find that it isn't so easy to sack a technologically superior enemy. And in the cases where they do succeed in sacking them, due to logistical problems for example, like the muslims did to the romans and the jews, the experience is one of constant rabid and unpredictable violence on a massive scale. Despite what you may think, the myth of the noble savage is just that, a myth.
As for the "exterminated" part, I think that's massively unfair. First of all, it took quite a while for that to happen, and it actually largely happened after the conquest. As to the manner in which happened, how can you possibly give the impression that this was the intent ? This happened because European feet were washed in the same river as native feet. Blaming the "invaders" makes about as much sense as claiming meteorites are weapons of mass destruction. Sometimes things go horribly wrong, and a meteor can make millions of victims. But it is a mere phenomenon, and until at least the 20th century it was no more under the control of humans as hurricanes.
The phenomenon itself, those diseases, has a name. It's called "island species" and was described by Darwin himself. I've got more bad news for you : we're still doing that. Give it another 400-500 years and there will be no more black people, anywhere in the world. Are we massacring them ? Because this process will complete first in America. (island species is a ridiculous name for this btw, "island races" would be more accurate). African Americans will be about as different from the aver
Historically, Christianity has done it the other way around: first conquer, then conversions.
Cute thought. Read up on history. Not even the most rabid anti-christian historians claim any hint of violence during the first 4 centuries of Christianity. 4 centuries. In case you're confused, that would be between 10 and 12 generations. And this was under constant violence against Christians. Even after that, Christianity has always been spread by absurdly small numbers of people. It's all good and well to claim e.g. South America was converted by soldiers, but what I find sorely lacking in that explanation is how exactly ~ 2000 soldiers defeat tens of millions of people ? Well, let's just say either they had some serious divine help, or most of those conversions were at the very least not at the point of a gun. The same can be said about most (granted, not all) other "forced" conversions to Christianity. You can claim 200 soldiers defeated most of Northern Europe until the cows come home, but ...
Contrast this with how pakistan became muslim : the most modest death tolls are talking about 200 million corpses. How Xinjang became muslim : probably around 20 million corpses. How northern africa became muslim : ~ 30 million corpses (out of a population of less than 50 million). Iran : ~1 million corpses according to babylonian and persian sources (which again was a hell of a percentage of the local population) (they didn't even believe these numbers themselves. Neither nation even had a word denoting a million, so they had to use weird multiplication to describe it. Were they lying ? Perhaps about the number, not about how it spread). And let's not forget the constant massacres muslims committed in Spain, which are very well documented (starting with the granada, toledo and various massacres, starting immediately after the invasion). And the massacres today ...
Somehow where muslims go, genocide always follows. Whether we're talking Europe, South Africa, China, South Asia, Northern Asia, Russia, ... none of it matters.
Can we at the very least agree that there is a VERY clear difference here ? Sure it's not Christianity 100% innocent - islam 0%. It's more like Christianity 99.9% innocent - islam 0.1% (a few isolated lucky breaks). Moral equivalence is a dumb theory.
That's what a Christian is: a communist who uses God to justify their policies.
And the other choice is what, exactly ? An atheist socialist who acts like the Soviets, sees no reason to not kill a few hundred million people because he has some pseudo-scientific excuse (or military, or he just hates them, or doesn't like their ideology, or ... does anyone have an exhaustive list of reasons the Soviets committed genocide ? It's gonna be a long list).
In short I daresay that if this is the difference between a Christian communist and the atheist kind, then I'll take my chances with the Christian kind, thank you very much.
And if Europe got its act together, liberalized, and started defending itself instead of relying on the US, the US would be fighting fewer wars.
In reference to your above comment : make Europe a 90% Christian nation again, and this will happen in a matter of months. As long as atheist "progressives" run amok : not a chance in hell. After all, wars are caused by guns, aren't they ? And by Jews, of course ... (just parrotting the general progressive excuse for defunding militaries and explaining the immediate followup violence) (oh and if you accuse a european liberal of racism, then he scratches "Jews", replaces it by Israeli, and proceeds to say that he doesn't quite like the local brand of recognizable (also known as orthodox) "Israelis" either)
So you mean that lowering the food supply, so rich ecologians can driving cars while feeling good, combined with dozens of policies to redirect all sorts of resources from food to ill-fated inferior products has not resulted in exponential population growth.
Seriously ?
Strange ...
Ironically google apparently outsources dns to godaddy.
So does Christianity.
No it doesn't. Well, only if you interpret it's goal of eventually converting every human, and "claim" the land they live on as a world-conquest goal. I suppose in some ways that's reasonable. But compare it to the islamic goal of militarily killing or converting every piece of land on the planet (yes, land, they have little interest in people. In fact there is discussion whether slaves, or conquered people, even when they claim to be part of the faith are muslims even today amongst institutions. E.g. the taliban, say "no", so do the salafists (which are still > 60% of all muslims worldwide). muslim ideology is all about conquering states) ... it's clearly not on the same level. Similarly, compare it to the communist goal of violent revolutions in every state structure across the globe, resulting in everything being controlled by a single communist party ... not quite on par, don't you agree ?
Communism, fascism, and socialism are very similar to Christianity (so similar, in fact, that American conservatives keep accusing European nations run by conservative Christians as being "socialist").
If you go by the names of the parties, perhaps (even there it'd be a stretch). But these were at best a tiny socialist veneer over a capitalist core. I doubt you could say the same about the Soviet Union, Southern America, or Eastern Europe. And it wouldn't apply to quite a few of even those European nations. Yes the core of Western Europe ... it probably applies there. Outside of that geographically small part of Europe ... not so much.
Besides I've been there. While it's true that there is some measure of conservative Christians there, the prevailing conservative political ideology is ex-communists who changed their minds when they saw what huge damage was done. They mostly were openly communist in their youth, and then saw what the Soviet union pulled. Needless to say, they didn't want that to happen there. They still like the idea of communism, but they ... well they don't want to live in a communist state. So they try to be as communist as possible without actually touching the basic operation of the economy, e.g. their pension systems, sick leave, etc really are an application of "from each according to ability, to each according to need". And these people are utterly disgusted by how young people sabotage these systems en-masse, and even more so by how "political refugees" do it. They really want to have this quiet life where you work, and are provided for, and they're abhorred because they understand perfectly well that it won't work with the way the new generation is using these systems, and they're desperately looking for solutions. Just read the history of the French government, like Bertrand Couchner, who is a really good example. At which point Christianity has any role in this, well ... you tell me.
These guys are opposed by the "progressive" parties, whose main role seems to be to maximally exploit the laws these conservatives made. They're all about making sure that people who just arrived from brazil or morocco as "political refugees" get their "right" to free health care, "living wages" and so on, despite them obviously moving to europe for free cancer care. The argument that this will obviously destroy the system that they depend on does not seem to even scare these people. They have "rights" you see, and the state must provide, getting money from whoever has it*, like their parents did before.
* the scary part of these parties, which they will deny screaming, is of course that this is exactly one step removed from "get it from our neighbors". Some of these parties actually advocate militarily attacking e.g. american corporations and raid them for money. Tell me, how far would that be removed from open war ? And the only thing those corporations (not exclusively American ones btw, Dutch Petr
Great idea. There is of course a tiny little difference here. islam claims the whole world as it's territory (split up in "already conquered" (dar al islam) and "to conquer" (dar al harb)). There's the tiny little issue of course that ideologies need territorial control to exist. Or at the very least, I hope you can see why ideologies don't share ground with islam and it's constant genocides. Communists ran extermination campaigns in some parts of the middle east just for this reason.
As for your idea of non-deistic ideologies ... they've not exactly provided us with peace either. Communism comes to mind as an obvious example. All sorts of dictatorial idelogies, of course. What else do we have ? Socialism has not exactly been peaceful, insofar it's even different from communism of course. Buddhism, insofar as it's a non-deistic religion (it's not imho, but you hear the argument often), has not exactly been peaceful. I mean when it comes to being peaceful ... euhm ... pure capitalism (if this exists) ? While I can't seem to come up with any specific wars caused by this, well maybe Iraq, anyway regardless of the cause of the Iraq war, consensus seems to be it's not exactly peaceful ... Is nazism non-deistic ? Hmmm.
So do tell, which ideology, preferably one that has actually run a state (ie. isn't totally in the realm of fantasy), would you suggest ?
So if I pirate a DVD player program, play legally owned DVDs with it, you are going to sue me to take away my happiness for the X amount of hours I spent using the software? I'm not even going to bother asking how you determine the value of X, assuming the crack prevented the program from phoning home.
Believe it or not, this is a solved problem. How do you reimburse people for damages that usually can't be undone ? This problem was solved, oh about 2000BC (it's used in old testament texts) : It's why damages are awarded in money. You're supposed to provide the damaged party an amount in money equivalent for the suffered loss. So if you pay somebody $5 for watching your car and he drives it off a cliff, he doesn't buy you a new car. Rather he pays you in dollars for your loss, as determined by a neutral third party, the judge. How much if your rich fiancee was in the car at the time ? Determined by the judge.
For both of your X'es, if not known (through some legal means, like someone testifying), the judge will simply let both parties give their opinion on the matter, and pick one (why pick one ? To make it more likely that both parties say something reasonable. If you say 0 as a defendant, or $100 billion as a plaintiff, you get stuck with whatever the other party pins on you. Get it ?).
I realize these things are probably not going to satisfy you. But let's face it, I don't think you'd settle for anything other than "steal away" (I think steal is justified here, since you're more than likely to have the same opinion on things like vendor contracts (like cell phone), employment contracts, actually hacking to bypass a payment on a site, ... Essentially that you know perfectly well it's wrong, and don't care about your own legal obligations. Needless to say, that won't fly in court (three guesses why).
In fact I think this is the whole problem : you think that just because you can you should be allowed to.
Oh you don't know. You only have to be compatible with one system. A Sun system that is older than I am, to be exact.
In fact I know one country that pays $100k for every single healthcare computer, because it's the only approved model their software runs on (which is still in development, using mainframe development tools). Today they have to be custom made one-by-one. Thank God they've at least used an emulator for the storage of things like pictures and scans, so actual hard drives can be used (well 16G, but hey. That's modern for these guys)
It's a case of pick your poison, I guess.
That people are stupid is not the fault of healthcare providers. Clearly this causes people to buy. In case you're confused, it means they want this.
Although I disagree with your assessment, even assuming it's true.
Clearly in your mind theft justifies genocide of you and your children. And we all know you've stolen from someone at some point, so ... Yes if you want to move into my apartment and I get to blow you, your family, wife, girlfriend, children and generally anyone you know up for fun after that (don't worry I'll claim there's some religion involved).
But let's not even go there. You're one of the "moral equivalence" lefties. You've clearly done something wrong in your life, like lying for example. And you claim every crime justifies any kind of revenge. You've lied to me, is that not enough for me to massacre your family ? I mean why draw the line for justified massacring at theft, why not at mere lying. Or better yet, at mere irritation.
Oh wait, let's use the excuses the paedophile prophet used :
allah told me to massacre you
one of your children stole from me (from a village 25km away, kid had not a single mean of transport)
I no longer feel like respecting the peace treaty
allah forbade me from respecting the peace treaty
women (even without explicitly defining what exactly was done)
Because I can, you cannot defend yourself, and clearly by winning we're superior (says the guy who at one point ordered 4 women to carry him, unwounded just very fat, up a hill to escape a force defending a city he was attacking)
Oh and muslims were massacring Jews 1400 years before modern Israel existed. And they have not wasted the years in between either. In fact I seriously doubt there is any people on this planet that has not yet been on the receiving end of a muslim massacre.
I mean in order to give rationale to muslim massacres you'd not just have to explain what Jews or Americans have done, but
don't forget Black people living in the Sahara (Sudan and elsewhere)
Somalians
Buddhist Taiwanese
Christian Filipinos
Chinese Malaysians, I'm betting the large majority was communist
Chinese Indonesians, same
Hindu Pakistani
Hindu Bangladeshi
Hindu Indians
Tell me, have they all ... *shudder* ... stolen something ? Oh sure that justifies wiping them out then !
How about a simpler solution : let's wipe out islam, and end 95% of wars on this planet. I'm sure people will find a new excuse, but it'll be quiet for 200 years or so at least.
democratic underground ? The batman comics are a more reliable news source ...
Ok, but one condition.
From now on I get to pound your house with ill-aimed rockets aimed at you, your kids, your wife, your girlfriend. You do not get to initiate any kind of violence in response to this, not calling the police, not running out of that house, nothing. After a few months of that we can "talk" (by that I mean I'll shoot you the moment you enter the room).
Any action on your part will obviously make you a war criminal, by your own standards, agreed ? Since you clearly consider this reasonable conditions, let's get started.
You know pretty well what the evidence is. Iran has been confirmed as having a large scale tritium production facility.
So here's the deal :
either Iran knows more about the nuclear physics than we do, and has some weird use for large amounts of tritium
or they're making a bomb
The same argument is true for their reactor design. It's a horrible power producer, and a reasonably efficient enrichment facility.
The same is true about the site : it's electricity connection is pathetic, barely an afterthought. Why do they need a nuclear power plant that is not connected to the grid (not well enough to supply real amounts of power to the grid, obviously it is somewhat connected).
The same is true about the amount of centrifuges they need. For operation of this power plant, you need, say, a hundred. For making a bomb you'd need at least 5000. How much do they have ? Somewhere around 9000.
There are dozens more considerations like this. Sure all of these are like 99%-1% dividers. There is a small chance of "innocence" in all cases, looked at individually. Nobody believes the whole picture is anywhere near coincidental.
Why do you ?
And if people like you ever get in charge the first war that comes to call, maybe a small border skirmish, would immediately develop into WWIII.
I hope you have the intelligence to see why this would happen. But the very, very short, extremely simplified, version goes like this : people attack because they believe they can win (for some definition of win), and obviously have decided to use force. If they do indeed win, they will not stop, they will switch to their secondary objectives. That's why if Iraq and Iran are fighting, the correct tactical action is to support the losing side, to the point that the balance between them is maintained (preferably while weakening both of them extremely). Had Iraq seriously advanced, the US would have supported Iran.
There is the faint hope in the back of my mind that maybe, just maybe, you'll see that this is indeed the right thing to do. It's not just a military decision.
No, it has to do with the fact that socialist take offence with the fact that they have to share their communications platforms with competing ideas. Not exactly news to anyone, that the tolerance of "liberals" is far below the freezing point, but hey ...
Assuming life is not a zero-sum game, there is a rational reason for cooperation with strangers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat
Tit for tat does not explain kindness to strangers. It explains a limited form of trade between near-equal partners. It does not explain kindness to strangers - at all. In a Nash equilibrium most people would have 0 interactions, and hence receive no aid. It doesn't work.
As for a definition of morality -- it is just that: behaving in a social fashion, rather than an asocial fashion.
And your conviction of atheism is equally socially based. The only argument for atheism that matters in your mind can be simplified into that your friends think it cool. In reality you believe in nothing, you're just somewhat adapted to your environment.
Something that would NEVER happen in the real world.
Right. This merely shows that your understanding of evolution was last seen in any serious mind in the 19th century ... In reality most "evolution" is exactly that, genes moving from one species to another, through viruses and other infectious agents. Most genes get "developed" in lifeforms with really, really short evolutionary cycles. Usually not even bacteria, but the most simple prokaryotic lifeforms. Then those genes get transplanted through bacteriophages (or merely bad timing during cell division) into bacteria, which then infect plants and animals and ...
The human genome plays host to no less than 12 near-complete viral DNA codes. That's when you're not sick. It also contains multiple long strands of bacterial DNA.
You do realize you're giving poisonous plant as options here, right ? Yes using massive automation (not available in large parts of the world) it can be made mostly safe ... but come on ! You're arguing that poisonous plants are a solution to eating healthy ...
Also, taking nutricional advice from a propaganda site like that ... what can possibly go wrong, too bad like with all these "good for nature" policies, others must suffer for your delusions.
Not that what the google search reveals unfortunately happens about 5 times yearly in Europe and America, and is entirely 100% avoidable. There's no shortage of issues with veganism and pregnancy either. Sadly, if children suffer nutrient deficiency in the womb, they hardly ever recover.
I haven't read too much so far about mathematical philosophy, but Bertrand Russell at least appears to propose alternatives to Peano's axioms.
True, if memory serves he proposed ZFC, which is now known to be vastly more inconsistent than ZF. It's inconsistent in ways that you will run into in daily life. Nobody uses it though.
My argument that the creation of models of the world on the basis of evidence and testing is a process not compatible with 'believe this because an authority says so', but that humans frequently use one of the two at a time depending on which seems most appropriate to them? I don't see how the models not being perfect models causes problems for this argument.
The problem is that you accept one known-to-be-wrong argument (e.g. ZF, but likewise things like relativity and quantum theory, and loads of inconsistent theories further on) on external authority, and claims of it's utility, yet refuse to do the same for a might-be-wrong model, where you admit equal utility exists ... For science "utility" is reason enough, yet it isn't enough for religion. Those models of science are like stating "the sky was painted blue 500 years ago", it provides an accurate description, useful prediction, and is known to be wrong. Yet you would never accept that theory : it is not merely "imperfect" in that it has a few holes. It is wrong, in the sense that it contradicts itself. Just because you are not currently properly equipped to detect the holes in, say, even in classical mechanics does not mean they don't exist.
Which makes the "they're correct" argument bullshit for your belief in science. So what remains ? Utility. Would you seriously claim that belief in the bible is not useful, given the current civilization that it has managed to build ? (I don't like that argument, actually, you should not believe because of utility, you should believe, plain and simple. If utility is what drives your life, you are a very poor person indeed)
My belief that humans have a moral capacity consisting of a set of emotions triggered by certain situations isn't a result of my atheism.
And it is trivial to produce a counterexample (in fact it's easy to point out that finding 100 million counterexamples would not be a huge problem. If you look towards history, it is plain to see that there have been huge time periods where these "human" morals barely existed -if at all. Likewise, today, these human morals you describe are not shared by baffling numbers of humans). Ergo this statement is plainly wrong.
Besides any rational being would not even consider that argument. Rationality is supposed to be uninfluenced by low instincts and emotions, and I would consider this a far more important property of a rational person than having or lacking faith. Emotions will preclude any form of thought, rational or otherwise. In comparison, faith merely takes a few potentially rational options off the table, and puts others on the table in their place. Locking out strong emotions is far more important to a rational human than locking out faith. I know it is to me.
Whatever you say about how "natural human emotion" guides you towards good, I am perfectly aware of where it usually guides me. And trust me, it doesn't guide me towards anything remotely considered good morals. Are your emotions that different ?
The religious in many important religions have tried to claim human morality for themselves. They've taken something innately human and said 'this is from us,
I've already shown that there is nothing whatsoever innately human about your morality (anything else would be a massive contradiction with what we know about the brain, for one thing). The only innate morality that exists is the law of the jungle, with perhaps limited extensions with kindness to close relatives, due to darwinism working in groups as well as on an individual level.
But kindness to
I couldn't have said it better. It's pure calorie content, and indeed it's too high in America.
But even there, comparing the consequences of too high versus too low, you'll be going for the "too high" category if you have any sense. Of course, that doesn't quite justify taking in 3x your requirements ...
Still it's better to overfeed the poor (and everybody else) than to starve them. As anyone outside of America knows ...
Oh great, another propaganda point that somehow supersedes a 3 centuries of research (keeping soldiers alive on the high seas was an intense focus of research with lots of fuckups ... and you know what they already knew 3 centuries ago ? No matter what the fuckup, raw meat can fix it. Cooked/baked meat and fish (raw or cooked) can fix the large majority of fuckups with a few notable exceptions).
People (mostly small children though) die from not eating meat
If you die from too much meat, it'll be at 50 at the earliest.
And yes with a massively varied diet of plants you can avoid the need to eat meat almost completely. Not quite completely, but almost. To the point that your body can survive for maybe 2 decades without meat. This requires constant nutritional supplements (usually made from fish, so there's barely any nutricional supplements that qualify as vegetarian) and medical monitoring. It is a very difficult exercise, that's basically impossible in all but the most developed countries. You can cheat and drink milk and eat eggs, which will help a lot.
Your dietary suggestion of beans + grain is moronic. How about you eat beans and grains exclusively for 4 months, and we bet for 1000 dollars that it won't work. Of course, that's a bad bet, since either you cheat, or you die ... In both cases I doubt I'll see any money. You will after all have died from the most basic of food diseases, scurvy, after 2-3 months. That would be 2-3 weeks at best if you didn't start out living in one of the most developed nations on earth.
In practice 2 weeks will cause enough symptoms to manifest themselves that the pain alone will drive you back to normalcy : after about a week on your proposed diet you will get small wounds which won't heal, usually in places like the corners of the mouth or between the fingers and toes. They won't heal. A little after that they will start to rip open merely because you move your body. A crust will form on them, time and again, but it will be unable to remain attached to your skin. These wounds will slowly grow in size. From that point on you will feel extremely bad and spend upwards of 14 hours in bed each day, you will lose interest in anything and everyting, complaining of a constant headache. And we're not even at ONE month yet. After a month you will lose the ability to breathe normally and have a constant sharp pain in your bones. Keep it up, and a few teeth will fall out, you will constantly have blood in your mouth, the result of large infected areas in your mouth, rendering you unable to eat or drink without extreme discomfort. Likewise, blood will leak from the other small wounds, which at this point won't be all that small anymore. After this, random internal bleeding will start occuring, making you look like a person who's gone 10 rounds against Mike Tyson, unsuccessfully. From this point on, if you're unlucky, it takes a few weeks for you to die. You will die from total loss of internal body cohesion : blood will literally leak everywhere, and at the autopsy if they break your skin without taking the pressure of first, it will gusher out.
Any other dietary suggestions ? Hint : best include the most basic of additives, vitamin C. It would also be great if you actually noticed that plants do not contain all 9 of the essential amino acids, and so you will have to include at least two non-plant lifeforms. And please note that children have 13 essential amino acids, so their dietary requirements (in the sense that they die if they don't get it) are more extensive. There are tons of special cases where additional nutrients are required either because of genetic predisposition or simple external factors ranging from contact with salt water to lack of sunlight.
There is one substance that contains all required nutrients for a human being : meat (raw meat). With fish being a close second (likewise raw), with only a few omissions. Pulverizing the bones and adding them to the meat itself makes both meat and fish much healthier (a feature ironically only part of "low-quality" meats).
Are they absolutely required ? No. But if you don't take them ... you get to puzzle everything together. Miss one piece and you will not like the result at all.
Rich countries outlaw GM crops, and become net importers of food instead of exporters ... and since food is extremely inelastic, this results in relatively large price increases for food ...
Add to that the fact that the human population is still growing exponentially.
The only way to limit resistance, is to not protect the vast majority of the population. That would help (it might in fact decrease resistance). The potential "pool" in which these bacteria live is the whole of the human species. And what matters is how much of that pool is filled with the medicine when it also is in contact with the bacteria. Whether or not that pool is filled in places without contact ... no one cares. As long as you keep protecting the population that contact area is necessarily close to 100% of the bacteria's breeding ground ... and for the bacterium it's "adapt or die" just like it is for us. So far, with 2 exceptions, they've adapted. And I hear that thanks to muslims, those 2 exceptions are in serious danger of becoming not so exceptional at all anymore.
Unless by "only when necessary" means that you let the diseases take their course and only when it is absolutely (and painfully, in most cases) clear that the patient will not recover without antibiotics do you administer them, and then only in a huge dosage, and quarantine the patient for a week after the treatment ends. Of course, mistakes will be made and people will die (though in the very long term casualties will be minimized, I doubt that'll be a great comfort to parents who get to see first hand that the child death rate goes up significantly under scenarios like this. And of course people would die within meters of substances that would cure them, with the cost paid much later by the population as a whole). And of course this is extremely unrealistic in the case of an epidemic.
Even then, over time you're strengthening the immune system of parts of the population unevenly. We all know how that ended last time.
On the other hand, if we make the assumption that medicine will advance fast enough to compensate for resistance, then overusing antibiotics is probably the best tactic. And there's plenty of historical precedent for that assumption, even if it's of course not a certainty. "Adapt or die", up close and personal. Lord help us if another war breaks out though.
How is this relevant to how the plants were created ?